Final Cut Pro upgrade on the way

Rumour has it that the next version of Final Cut Pro (FCP) is ‘jaw droppingly’ good and smart moviemakers can find out for themselves when Apple release its update on 12 April.

It looks like Apple will launch a ‘significant upgrade’ with 100 new features at the FCP users’ meet up next week in Las Vegas.

Apple’s popular film editing software is the as industry standard with 1.4 million users and 50% of the market.

‘The new Final Cut Studio includes more than 100 new features and dramatically expands Apple’s ProRes family of codecs so editors can work in the studio with the highest quality video or on location at low bandwidths,’ said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

Final Cut Pro 7, what’s new:
• expands Apple’s ProRes codec family to support virtually any workflow. ProRes Proxy allows offline and mobile editing at low bandwidth; ProRes LT allows general purpose editing; and ProRes 4444 is for editing and visual effects at the highest quality possible
• easy Export allows users to continue working on projects while encoding is done in the background and the sequence is exported to YouTube, MobileMe, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, DVD or Blu-ray
• iChat Theater support allows real time collaboration by sharing Final Cut® timelines or individual source clips with iChat users anywhere in the world, even if they don’t have a copy of Final Cut Pro
• new speed tools to change clip speed with ease
• alpha transitions to create dramatic effects using moving mattes
• native AVC-Intra support for the latest high quality Panasonic cameras

The last major update to Final Cut Studio was in July 2009. The new Final Cut Studio will cost $999, $300 less than the last version. Existing users can upgrade for $299.